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Madame Secretary

Condoleezza Rice and her mother, Angelena, at home in Birmingham in the late 1950s.Credit
Rice family, via Associated Press

It is one of the paradoxes of the Bush administration that the senior official whose face is among the most recognized around the world, and who is consistently ranked as the most popular at home, is perhaps the least known. Condoleezza Rice has regularly enjoyed poll numbers 20 points higher than those of the man she serves; in 2006 she topped an Esquire survey of the women men would most like to take as a date to a dinner party, ahead of Angelina Jolie, Julia Roberts, Oprah Winfrey and Jennifer Aniston. Yet, while most Americans probably have a good sense of what Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell have stood for, not many could confidently set out the beliefs of the current secretary of state. She is highly visible, speaks often and yet is strangely enigmatic.

“Twice as Good,” by Marcus Mabry, the chief of correspondents for Newsweek, works hard to solve the Rice puzzle. It digs deep into the story of her family, including her slave ancestors, and the hugely influential figure of her father, the Rev. John Rice. We follow the family’s journey from segregation in Alabama to educational opportunity in Colorado and finally to California. We learn much — with a detail uncommon in a political biography — of her almost frighteningly intense childhood.

An only child, Rice was groomed for greatness from birth. Initially home-schooled, the 4-year-old Condi would, Mabry reports, “put on her coat, leave her front door, walk to the end of the walk and then turn around and come back inside the house.” When she wasn’t studying, she would practice the piano for hours on end: she could read music before she could read. She didn’t fidget; she didn’t seem to need to go to the bathroom like other children. Her mother would let her play with the children across the street only if their doors were open and she could see her daughter at all times. Mrs. Rice once told a friend she would have no other children because she couldn’t take “this love” from Condoleezza.

Mabry supplies details like these for every chapter of his subject’s life. He tells us of her weakness for athletic men, especially “bad boy” types, and of the succession of football players she dated in college (though Rice has succeeded in keeping her later private life private). He charts her academic career, including her rocky spell as the youngest-ever provost of Stanford University, appointed at just 38, and of her earlier stint as a Soviet specialist on the first George Bush’s National Security Council. Yet still one feels oddly estranged from her.

That is not because Mabry has failed to get to the heart of Condoleezza Rice. Rather, it is because of the chilly steel he finds there. His search for vulnerabilities or doubt reveals only a cold, unwavering self-discipline. One of the book’s most telling moments comes when the 17-year-old Rice realizes, after surrendering her childhood to the goal of becoming a concert pianist, that she is not, after all, good enough. Her teacher ruled that while “technically competent ... she was too detached emotionally to be a great pianist.” She needed “disciplined abandon”: she had the discipline all right, she just couldn’t let herself go. Yet even this major blow barely troubles her. She simply decides to pursue another goal.

All of this is connected inseparably with race. Mabry, himself African-American and sharply alive to even the subtlest distinctions between different black experiences, shows that Rice inherited her father’s view of racism: don’t deny it, but don’t be defined by it. Opposed to the activism of Martin Luther King, John Rice saw individual effort, rather than collective action, as the path to black empowerment: be twice as good, and you can make it. Individual willpower became his daughter’s touchstone. She believes in will, and she certainly believes in power.

These insights help make sense of what is perhaps the most crucial period of Rice’s career, when she served as Bush’s first-term national security adviser. Mabry shows how several key Rice traits meshed with the failings of the rest of the Bush team, to disastrous effect. A group of national security principals that (bar Powell) was consumed with the hubristic determination to invade Iraq despite multiple warnings of calamitous results needed to hear a contrary voice. But Rice, like them, had an iron faith in her own beliefs. While the White House disdained those from what one official once notably called the “reality-based community,” so Rice had learned in segregated Birmingham to believe “that what mattered was what you and your self-defined society believed, because the world beyond was often wrong in its most critical judgments.” Back then the cocoon was the Rice family and its immediate circle; now it was the Bush administration. But in each case, Condi shut out what she did not want to hear.

If she was temperamentally ill-equipped to bring to the security council the skepticism so desperately required in that prewar period, her relationship with the president ensured she would never play the role of dissenter. Mabry describes the bonding of Bush and Rice before the 2000 campaign as nothing less than a courtship. The now legendary story of her Freudian slip at a Washington dinner party when she referred to the president as “my husb-” has stuck partly because it seems to convey some emotional truth. Even Rice’s own friends speak of a woman whose usual good judgment deserts her when it comes to Bush: “She cannot say no to that guy.”

It is surely this bond that explains the ideological gymnastics that make Rice so hard to pin down. She was, first, a realist, then a neoconservative enabler as Bush’s national security adviser and now a pragmatic cryptorealist as secretary of state (pushing for talks with Iran, for example). The obvious explanation for her changing course is her loyalty to the president. Mabry is kinder, suggesting that her conversion to the necessity of democratic transformation of the Middle East was genuine: she was “a realist who had been mugged by 9/11.”

Even if sincere, Rice emerges as badly flawed. She presided over a dysfunctional security apparatus, never able to pull together the warring Defense and State Departments and regularly outmaneuvered by Rumsfeld. It’s also clear that she ignored repeated warnings of both the seriousness of the Qaeda threat and the risks of an Iraq invasion. The former arms inspector David Kay calls her the worst national security adviser since the office was created, and the verdict seems harsh but not wholly unwarranted.

Rice’s defense would rest on her extraordinary presentational skills, her fluency and poise under inquisitorial fire. So what if she is more a synthesizer of others’ ideas than an original thinker, runs this logic; she has a sure political touch. Except even that is in doubt. Caught shopping for shoes in New York as the corpses floated in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, Rice explained that “I didn’t think about my role as a visible African-American national figure. I just didn’t think about it.” Given what we know of her upbringing, that isn’t psychologically surprising — but it showed a political tin ear.

None of this would matter much if Mabry’s subject were merely a departing secretary of state. But it’s plain, even from the jacket photo of a 9-year-old Rice posing outside the White House, that this is a book about a woman who just might become president. She certainly has the right profile for it: moderate on abortion and gay rights, firm on guns, a Californian, Rice could someday be the Schwarzenegger Republican the party is looking for. There is no doubt that she has the self-discipline and confidence. She has already come so far; who would bet against her going farther?